The Five-Minute Guide To Rupa and The April Fishes

Rupa Marya. Photo: Hilary Hulteen.

They’re a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-genre act (basically every Blue Frog programmer’s dream band). Rupa and the April Fishes is fronted by Indian-American singer-songwriter Rupa Marya who was born in the Bay Area, raised in the US, India (she spent part of her childhood in Dehra Dun) and France, and who currently lives in San Francisco. The April Fishes comprises four American instrumentalists from different ethnic backgrounds, Russian-Polish drummer Aaron Kierbel, Uzbek cellist Misha Khalikulov, Irani bassist Safa Shokrai, and Nicaraguan trumpet player Mario Alberto Silva. Their tunes are a mix of chanson, gypsy swing, Latin grooves and Indian ragas, sung in French, Spanish, Hindi and most recently, Greek and Romani.

Their music has the power to heal people (literally). Marya is a doctor of internal medicine and was until recently, working at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. “I am currently on sabbatical at the university but I do work at the free clinic for immigrants when I am home,” says Marya. “I haven’t had to care for a fan at a concert but I have been at other musician’s concerts and been the doctor at hand when someone broke an ankle.”

Their gig in Mumbai will pay homage to ghazal singer Jagjit Singh. “I was sad to hear of Jagjit Singh’s passing, the same day we arrived here,” says Marya. “We will be doing a rendition of one of my favourite songs of his, ‘Woh Kagaz Ki Kasthi.”  You can also expect to hear a “ rocka-Bolly” arrangement of the Kishore Kumar classic “Eena Meena Deeka”.

They may—or may not—explain the stories behind their songs. “It depends on the crowd,” says Marya. “The first time we were in Greece, we just launched into the music and had an amazing time and response. Because I don’t know Greek and didn’t know people’s comfort with speaking English, I didn’t feel there would be any reason to describe the songs. So I let the music speak for itself. Often, if the audience is somewhat intimate, I like to be able to give some context to the songs. Many of my songs have been inspired by poetry—from the works of [Jiddu] Krishnamurti to Hafez to Pablo Neruda—or they have been inspired by interactions I have had with patients in the clinical setting of the hospital.”

Just in case, here’s the story behind their Hindi song “Yaad”. “I wrote the song as a memory to my father who died ten years ago,” says Marya. “As I watched his ashes [being] poured into the water, I was trying to find a sound that would articulate the motion he took in his life, living between cultures. These in between spaces to me feel honest and slightly unsettling. These are the kinds of places I am trying to make music from, which give voice to the unnameable, the space between the idea and the word, the inarticulate. It is not Indian. It is not western. It is an attempt to express one perspective of being human.”

They’re a fairly “political” band. Marya began writing and singing songs in French in response to the strong reactions she witnessed in the US to anything foreign, in the aftermath of 9/11. “I was…so horrified by the reaction of fear, of what was unfamiliar to people that I felt happening in our country,” she told an America radio station in 2008. “And I wanted to write songs about love—which I had never done before—and to write them in a language that people in my immediate surrounding didn’t necessarily understand, but wouldn’t be wholly alienating to them. And to see if people could understand the emotion and the truth that was being conveyed under the language I was speaking through the music.”

She named their first album, eXtraOrdinary rendition after the terrorist abduction operation run by the CIA, and is currently working on the band’s third record, which is partly inspired by the current political landscape in the US. “We don’t see the hopeful future that Obama promised with his ‘change’ campaign,” Marya told us. “We see increasing financial disasters, increasing homelessness, increasing suicide, increasing joblessness, increasing numbers of people losing their health insurance or retirement—these are all indicators of failed social engineering.”

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Relevant DatesWednesday, October 12

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